As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Many information handling systems, such as desktop, portable and server computer systems, use a BIOS (basic input out system) at power up to start the operation of the system prior to loading of an operating system. The BIOS can also be used by the operating system after it starts. Traditionally, the BIOS is designed to be specific for particular computer systems and/or hardware within those computer systems.
In order to simplify the hardware interface for such information handling systems, a new UEFI (unified extensible firmware interface) BIOS was proposed. The UEFI BIOS provides a layer between the hardware and the BIOS code to provide a standardized interface that is not dependent upon the underlying hardware in the system. UEFI implementations, for example, those set forth by Intel Corporation, can have BIOS codes segments including PEI (pre-EFI) code, DXE (driver execution environment) code and SMM (system management mode) code. These different PEI, DXE and SMM codes segments run at different times during the start-up of an information handling system running the UEFI BIOS.
Some system manufacturers, such as Dell Inc., use manufacturing modes to facilitate the manufacture of information handling systems. The BIOS code can then be designed to use the manufacturing modes and manufacturing mode data during manufacture of a system.
FIG. 1A (Prior Art) depicts a manufacturing mode implementation 100 for a typical desktop computer system. As depicted, a plurality of desktop BIOS code segments 102, 104, 106 . . . communicate with and use a plurality of manufacturing (MFG) mode utilities 108 to determine manufacturing mode conditions and to store access/store manufacturing mode data 110. In particular, a plurality of manufacturing mode utilities 112, 114 . . . 116 can be used by the desktop BIOS code segments 102, 104, 106 . . . . Similarly, a wide variety of information blocks 122, 124 . . . 126 can store manufacturing mode data for the desktop BIOS code segments 102, 104, 106 . . . . One such information block that has been used is a stop-ship (SS) bit 122 that has represented whether or not a system stop-ship order has been set by one or more of the desktop BIOS code segments 102, 104, 106 . . . during the manufacturing of the system.
FIG. 1B (Prior Art) depicts a manufacturing mode implementation 150 for a typical portable computer system. As depicted, a plurality of portable BIOS code segments 152, 154, 156 . . . communicate with and use a centralized manufacturing (MFG) mode utility 158 to determine manufacturing mode conditions and to store access/store manufacturing mode data 160. A wide variety of information blocks 152, 154 . . . 156 can store manufacturing mode data for the portable BIOS code segments 152, 154, 156 . . . . As with FIG. 1A, one such information block that has been used is a stop-ship (SS) bit 152 that has represented whether or not a system stop-ship order has been set by one or more of the portable BIOS code segments 152, 154, 156 . . . during the manufacturing of the system.
While the manufacturing mode enabled systems of FIG. 1A (Prior Art) and FIG. 1B (Prior Art) have advantageous, they are not compatible with each other and are not UEFI compatible systems.